The Union statement on the importance of TB in Universal Health Coverage

29 April 2019

Today, 29 April 2019, the President of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, with the support of the World Health Organization (WHO) and UHC2030, convened an interactive multi-stakeholder hearing in New York, as part of the preparatory process for the UN High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

The Union formally submitted the following statement to the hearing:

“At last year’s UN High-Level Meeting on Tuberculosis (TB), member states endorsed a political declaration on ending global TB, which committed to specific targets for expanding TB diagnosis, treatment and prevention, including new commitments for reaching children who have been widely neglected in the TB response.

"With 36 percent of people with TB going undiagnosed, and 90 percent of the children who died from TB last year left untreated, there is no doubt that the goal of UHC goes hand-in-hand with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to end the global TB epidemic by 2030.

"We highlight the importance of ensuring the 2019 political declaration on UHC synergises with previous political declarations on TB and other disease areas. We would like to see the UHC declaration endorse the need to scale up care for TB and other “SDG diseases” through primary healthcare—including training the health workforce to deliver care. However, we would like to see a commitment that national health systems will preserve the specialised functions and funding needed to conduct TB surveillance, programme monitoring and supervision. Maintaining these specialised functions is critical for quality of care and for monitoring progress against TB, and other epidemics, towards reaching the SDGs.”

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